Chris Ault’s Hot Air is based upon a passage from Jeanette Winterson’s novel, Sexing the Cherry. In this novel, every word spoken by the residents of a village appears and rises into the sky as if it were made from smoke. Eventually, due to the proliferation of jibber jabber obscuring the sky, cleaners take to the skies in balloons to attempt to clean away all the wordage. They fail, however.
In this re-imagining of the piece, Chris Ault uses concrete aesthetic formatting to create the appearance of a city. The landscape of the buildings are made of the most recent tags taken from a collection of the internet’s most popular websites, including Engadget, Youtube, Perez Hilton, and Del.icio.us' instead of 'brick and mortar' . The roads are made of the day’s most popular Google search terms. This is alluded to the fact that Google, as a search engine and a company have become the main purveyors of the 'Information Highway'. Finally, reader comments from the aforementioned websites rise into the sky like clouds. Like in Sexing the Cherry, workers attempt to clear the sky of these words, and like in the novel, they are utterly unsuccessful.
Digital Medium:
Very little interactivity is given to the reader. There are no buttons, hyperlinks, or other interactive elements. The only interactivity the reader is allowed within this piece is the ability to reload the page so that there is a new possibility of new text because the hot air balloon for new tags and comments every 5 minutes.
Instead, the digital medium is utilized primarily in its potential for animation. The words rise into the sky across the browser and continue to hover around. Similarly, the cleaner moves around and attempts to clean the word pollution from the atmosphere.
The other way in which the digital medium is utilized is in its acquisition of the terms that populate the screen. These are loaded at the moment the page is accessed, meaning that the piece will be different at each viewing. It changes day to day, moment to moment, but some phrases linger longer than others.
Analysis:
This piece demonstrates the ways in which digital pieces can simultaneously limit reader agency and enhance electronic literature with qualities specific to the digital modality.
Just like we are no longer able to escape the endless news cycle of today, we cannot escape the constant invasion of Internet that has become as much a part of the landscape of human existence as the 'concrete' objects that make up our physical landscape. The virtual world is as much an integral part of our daily lives as the physical world.
The world of the piece is structured according to the ideas that proliferate in mainstream internet culture. How much influence do these ideas wield over our real world?
The reader comments fill the screen and resist attempts at cleaning and erasure. This suggests a permanency of words that exists regardless of medium.
Questions:
Does the lack of reader interaction capability limit the quality of the piece? Could the lack of interaction capability be so intentional, in that it forces us to face our disconnectivity from the real world while continuously being connected?
How might major world events/disasters alter this piece’s presentation? Would they even register? How much does the anonymity of the commentees and their comments floating around in the virtual world influence the current social landscape?
Chris Ault’s Hot Air is based upon a passage from Jeanette Winterson’s novel, Sexing the Cherry. In this novel, every word spoken by the residents of a village appears and rises into the sky as if it were made from smoke. Eventually, due to the proliferation of jibber jabber obscuring the sky, cleaners take to the skies in balloons to attempt to clean away all the wordage. They fail, however.
In this re-imagining of the piece, Chris Ault uses concrete aesthetic formatting to create the appearance of a city. The landscape of the buildings are made of the most recent tags taken from a collection of the internet’s most popular websites, including Engadget, Youtube, Perez Hilton, and Del.icio.us' instead of 'brick and mortar' . The roads are made of the day’s most popular Google search terms. This is alluded to the fact that Google, as a search engine and a company have become the main purveyors of the 'Information Highway'. Finally, reader comments from the aforementioned websites rise into the sky like clouds. Like in Sexing the Cherry, workers attempt to clear the sky of these words, and like in the novel, they are utterly unsuccessful.
Digital Medium:
Very little interactivity is given to the reader. There are no buttons, hyperlinks, or other interactive elements. The only interactivity the reader is allowed within this piece is the ability to reload the page so that there is a new possibility of new text because the hot air balloon for new tags and comments every 5 minutes.
Instead, the digital medium is utilized primarily in its potential for animation. The words rise into the sky across the browser and continue to hover around. Similarly, the cleaner moves around and attempts to clean the word pollution from the atmosphere.
The other way in which the digital medium is utilized is in its acquisition of the terms that populate the screen. These are loaded at the moment the page is accessed, meaning that the piece will be different at each viewing. It changes day to day, moment to moment, but some phrases linger longer than others.
Analysis:
This piece demonstrates the ways in which digital pieces can simultaneously limit reader agency and enhance electronic literature with qualities specific to the digital modality.
Just like we are no longer able to escape the endless news cycle of today, we cannot escape the constant invasion of Internet that has become as much a part of the landscape of human existence as the 'concrete' objects that make up our physical landscape. The virtual world is as much an integral part of our daily lives as the physical world.
The world of the piece is structured according to the ideas that proliferate in mainstream internet culture. How much influence do these ideas wield over our real world?
The reader comments fill the screen and resist attempts at cleaning and erasure. This suggests a permanency of words that exists regardless of medium.
Questions:
Does the lack of reader interaction capability limit the quality of the piece?
Could the lack of interaction capability be so intentional, in that it forces us to face our disconnectivity from the real world while continuously being connected?
How might major world events/disasters alter this piece’s presentation? Would they even register?
How much does the anonymity of the commentees and their comments floating around in the virtual world influence the current social landscape?